The Time of Bees
by ImpishTubist
Summary: Sherlock and Lestrade at the close of their life together.


**Notes:** Written some months ago for the Rare Pairs Fest. This was posted on LJ and AO3 in May 2012.

**Warnings:** Illness, Aging, Angst, Language, Character Death

**Disclaimer:** I own nothing.

**Betas:** Sidney Sussex and Canon_Is_Relative

* * *

"I plan to move to the country," Sherlock announced on the day they were married.

"Oh?" Lestrade said, taken aback but pliant enough with food and wine and sheer _joy_ that at that moment he would have followed Sherlock to Antarctica and back. "Now?"

"Don't be absurd," Sherlock said, staring at him dumbly. "Of course not _now_. Someday. When it's time. We'll move to the country and raise bees."

"All right," Lestrade said, reaching for his husband's hand. He twined their fingers together, silver bands glittering in the weak light from the streetlamps. Behind them, the reception was still going strong, and they had both escaped out here for a moment of peace.

A moment with one another.

"When it's time," Lestrade added, bringing Sherlock's hand to his lips and kissing the knuckles. "Of course. We'll go to the country and raise bees and be _ridiculously_ happy."

* * *

Sherlock stayed in Baker Street as long as he could.

But John passed away at fifty-six, far too young, and after that Sherlock didn't have the heart to keep the flat. It wasn't 221B anymore, not without John there, and so after twenty years of marriage, he finally moved in with his husband.

"Could be nice," Lestrade said one day, broaching the topic they hadn't discussed since their wedding day.

"Could be," Sherlock conceded. "You'd hate it."

"Not if you were there."

"Hm. Perhaps," Sherlock allowed. "But it's not time yet."

* * *

Lestrade fell a week shy of his seventieth birthday, down half a flight of stairs before he could catch himself, and broke his arm badly in the process.

"It's time," Sherlock said, hovering nervously near his chair when they returned from the doctor. This time, it was Lestrade who reached out and took Sherlock's hand, steadying him.

"No," he said. "No, not time yet. We aren't moving on account of me."

"But when, then?"

"When it's time," was all Lestrade would say on the subject. "When we can't stay any longer. Do you understand?"

"No," Sherlock admitted.

"That's all right," Lestrade said, kissing his fingers. "I'll understand for us."

* * *

Sherlock turned fifty-six.

They didn't mark the day, not that birthday, but in bed later that night Lestrade turned questioning eyes on him.

"No," Sherlock said. "Not yet."

"All right," Lestrade said, reaching for his hand. "We'll stay."

* * *

They attended funerals.

This was a practice Lestrade had slowly grown accustomed to, ever since he hit his mid-fifties and had to bury his parents within five years of one another. They were followed into the unknown by his aunts and uncles and, then, slowly, his former schoolmates and peers as well.

Sherlock, being nearly two decades younger, was just on the cusp of this stage of his life. He'd already buried John and both his parents, but Mycroft was still doing well (and, Sherlock confided privately to Lestrade, would probably outlive them all. Man was too stubborn to die).

Lestrade actually felt the same was true of Sherlock.

But then Mrs. Hudson passed away after a long and strenuous fight with cancer, and Lestrade found that he was the one doing the comforting instead of the other way around. And Sherlock, who had regarded the kindly landlady as something akin to a maternal figure, was distraught for weeks afterward, though no one noticed apart from his husband.

"Is it time?" Lestrade whispered one night when he came out into the living room to find Sherlock sitting in the windowsill, forehead pressed against the frosty glass, staring out numbly onto the street below.

"No," Sherlock murmured. "No, not time yet."

"Still too many reasons to stay," Lestrade prompted. They did this now; making up lists, considering their options, figuring out whether the good of staying in still London outweighed the bad.

"Yes," Sherlock said softly. "There's still Mycroft."

"And Molly."

"And Donovan. And... and Anderson."

"Mike Stamford."

"You," Sherlock said, reaching for his hand, though he didn't lift his gaze from the quiet street.

"Yeah, lad," Lestrade murmured, wrapping his heavily-veined hand around Sherlock's roughened one. "Yeah. I'm still here."

* * *

Lestrade turned seventy-four.

Sherlock threw him an outrageous party, and invited every one of Lestrade's surviving relatives - including his distant cousins, who lived now in the States. He decorated their flat and threw on a ridiculous party hat and even got down on his hands and knees to play with Lestrade's grand-nephews.

"What was all that about?" Lestrade asked later that evening, laughing as he tweaked Sherlock's hat. Sherlock was sprawled on the floor in front of him while Lestrade sat on the sofa. Wrapping paper and streamers and noise-makers littered the room, but Sherlock wouldn't let Lestrade lift a finger to clean it up.

"Is it so unusual for one to throw a birthday party for his spouse?"

Lestrade raised an eyebrow at him; Sherlock rolled his eyes and hauled himself up so he was sitting on the sofa next to Lestrade. He draped an arm across Lestrade's shoulders and pressed a kiss to his cheek. Lestrade smelled wine, and smiled to himself. Sherlock didn't often drink, and when he did it made him more affectionate; more open.

"I wanted to do this for you," Sherlock murmured against his skin, and then drew back. Their eyes met, and Lestrade brushed his knuckles against Sherlock's jaw, reading the unspoken words in his gaze.

_Because we may not get another chance. _

"Not time yet," he murmured.

"All right," Sherlock said, nodding. "Not time yet."

* * *

Lestrade started to forget.

It was small at first, inconsequential things, so insignificant that even Sherlock missed the early signs.

But then there was the day when he came home to find Lestrade sitting at the kitchen table, palms flat on the polished wood, staring blankly at the surface. Sherlock crossed the distance between them swiftly and knelt before him, placing a hand on his thigh.

"Greg."

Lestrade looked at him then, and slowly picked his right hand off the table. Sherlock saw that he had been covering something with it, and a moment later Lestrade's keys were dropped into the palm of his hand.

"Found these," Lestrade croaked, "in the fridge."

Sherlock's blood ran cold.

* * *

The diagnosis came at the end of the week.

Sherlock brought him home afterward, and Lestrade sat in his customary chair, reaching for his glasses and his crossword puzzle, looking for all the world as though nothing was wrong.

Except that everything was wrong.

Sherlock managed to shed his jacket and his shoes before he was sinking on shaking legs before Lestrade's chair, the weight of it all pressing down on him until he could no longer stand. He pressed his forehead in to Lestrade's knees, and Lestrade threaded thick fingers through his hair.

"It's time," he whispered.

"No."

"Greg, _please_ -"

"No, Sherlock. Not yet. Remember what I said about not doing this on account of me?"

"I have to do _something_ -"

Lestrade bent over double and pressed his lips to the unruly curls, which had mostly retained their dark color, apart from a few strands of silver and white.

"You are. You're going to stay here, with me, and we're going to fight this. _I'm_ going to fight this." Lestrade swallowed. "I have to, Sherlock. Please. Allow me this one last battle."

Sherlock took a ragged breath. "Not time yet?"

"No, Sherlock. It's not time yet."

* * *

The disease advanced slowly, eroding only the edges of Lestrade's mind, allowing them to believe for most hours of the day that he was all right.

But then something would catch his eye, and he would frown, and Sherlock knew he was trying to remember. Sometimes it was a photograph; sometimes it was an article in the paper. Once it was Sherlock's website, when he stumbled across a recent case that Sherlock had written up and pointed it out to him.

"Jewel heist?" he said disbelievingly, gesturing to the screen. "When did you find the time to solve that one? Says you did it only just last week!"

His chuckle died in his throat at the look on Sherlock's face.

"I was there?" he said softly.

"You were there," Sherlock replied. "You were sitting in your chair when I wrote it up. I narrated it for you. Do you remember?"

"No." Lestrade rallied, closing out the website and pushing the computer aside. "But that doesn't mean it's time yet. Come on, let's go for a walk."

* * *

Sally Donovan called upon them one week in the early fall. It was one of Lestrade's (thankfully, still many) good days, and he made lunch for them all. Sally showed off pictures of her granddaughter and told Lestrade she had heard from Gregson and Dimmock in the past week; Sherlock tolerated the reminiscing with an air of his usual pained indulgence.

And after, when Lestrade left the room to take a call from his sister, Sally leaned forward and murmured, "Are you all right?"

Sherlock blinked. "He's the one with the disease."

"Yes. But you're the one left behind."

"He's not gone yet."

Sally cast a glance around the living room. Photographs adorned walls that had once been bare and pictures dotted every surface - tables, mantel, shelves. They were pointed reminders for Lestrade; stark mile-markers of the disease's slow march.

"Are you sure?"

Sherlock looked away.

* * *

Sherlock kept a photograph pressed between the pages of an apiology text. John had taken it, nearly twenty years ago at a Christmas party in Baker Street. Lestrade and Sherlock had been standing by the fireplace, Lestrade leaning against the mantel with a drink in hand while Sherlock gestured, in the midst of a story. He couldn't recall, now, what he had been so emphatically recounting to Lestrade, but the photograph had captured their open expressions; their youth.

Lestrade's vitality.

His hair had been salt-and-pepper back then, his face full, a silver ring glinting on his finger while its twin sat on Sherlock's hand. And the way he looked at Sherlock - _had _looked at Sherlock - with those penetrating chocolate eyes that took him apart and put him together again; the eyes that indulged Sherlock, that crinkled in amusement, that left no illusion that Lestrade saw right through every barrier he had ever attempted to erect around himself... that was gone forever, now. The way Lestrade looked at him now was a shade of his former gaze - slightly puzzled, sometimes bemused, but always with a little less understanding.

Lestrade didn't _see _him anymore.

Sherlock shut the book and held it to his chest. Lestrade was shuffling around in the kitchen, making tea. He loved Gregory; he could say that now. He _needed _to say it now, and hear it in return.

But _Christ_, did he miss his husband.

"Sherlock, your mobile's ringing!"

He breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of the old book, and then replaced it on the shelf. He swiped a thumb across one eye, pretending that the liquid he found there was a fault of the dusty tome, and then strode into the kitchen.

* * *

Sherlock found Lestrade sitting in their room one afternoon, an old photo album open across his lap. He walked over to the bed and sank down on it next to Lestrade, recognizing the leather binding.

"Our wedding," he murmured. The album had been Lestrade's idea, and Sherlock had indulged him even though he scoffed at the sentimentality. But now, he was grateful they had documented the day.

Lestrade glanced at him, and then flipped to the beginning of the album. He offered it to Sherlock, who took it, puzzled.

"I wrote this," Lestrade said, his voice paper-thin, "the day of the diagnosis. Just in case."

Sherlock glanced at the inside cover. A small note was affixed to the page.

_Gregory Lestrade, age 50, married Sherlock Holmes, age 32, on October 17, 2012. _

And, underneath that, in a less-steady hand:

_If forgotten, then it's time. _

Sherlock swallowed hard. "Did you forget?"

"For a moment." Lestrade's hand flexed; Sherlock took it in his own. "I remember now. But I could forget again."

He trained bloodshot eyes on his husband. "I don't want to forget. Not this. It can take everything else from me, but not this. Not _you."_

"Gregory." Sherlock shut the album. "The bees were a fantasy. London is your home. And you can have the best medical care here."

"And what good is that," Lestrade said softly, "if I'm going to forget you anyway? It hasn't helped so far. Today shouldn't have happened. No. We are moving to the country, where it's just us. I won't have anything to distract me from you. I'm going to study you every day, Sherlock. Every moment. I _won't_ let you be lost, too. And I can do that out in the country."

"I can remember for us," Sherlock pleaded. "Just like...just like you would understand for me. Do - do you remember that?"

"I told you I would tell you when it was time to move to the country," Lestrade said. Sherlock bowed his head. "Yes, that I remember."

"It's time?" he asked finally.

"Yeah," Lestrade said. "It's time. Time for the bees."

Sherlock nodded solemnly, and kissed his knuckles.

"Time for the bees, then."


End file.
